Well, so just the other day went for the $40 windows 8 upgrade offer that is still good until the end of the month. The price seemed fair enough and I was curious to upgrade from windows xp, a dated but classic os that works well if you don't count the security vulnerabilities (With all the xp system updates and minimal browsing I never encountered much noticeable trouble, but the word is the security is poor without a virus app running all the time).
Anyways, the first surprise was that the ~2 gig download did not provide an option to burn the download updater to a DVD or CDs (even though I thought I read on a forum that it did have that option).
I tried to clone the xp system which now had the downloaded and installed updater to another almost identical 500 gb drive, without success (should've done the slower sector by sector approach possibly)--the cloned system simply booted but hung in some loop (no luck trying to do safe boot or other such variants).
So, I say what the heck, just go ahead with the install and hope I'm lucky. I then get a BSOD, saying the video driver was caught in an infinite loop, and to restart and try again, which I did just to get the same BSOD. So I set the video resolution to 800x600 VGA, remove the display driver, and try again. This time I got lucky and after some time and reboots, I've got windows 8 on my system! Pheww!!
I play around a while with the new UI, and it's like they say, just simply unacceptable, so one thing in the to-do list is to get it to revert to a classic standard interface.
But that's not my first concern right now. My hard drive is already almost 5 years old I believe, and the old days where drives typically went over ten years without failing are no more (the flip side of the incredibly high storage densities these days, plus the price competitiveness of the business).
So, my question: what exactly do I need to protect myself against this inevitable scenario?
What are my options for being able to restore my system? And what are all the things I need to do?
Anyways, the first surprise was that the ~2 gig download did not provide an option to burn the download updater to a DVD or CDs (even though I thought I read on a forum that it did have that option).
I tried to clone the xp system which now had the downloaded and installed updater to another almost identical 500 gb drive, without success (should've done the slower sector by sector approach possibly)--the cloned system simply booted but hung in some loop (no luck trying to do safe boot or other such variants).
So, I say what the heck, just go ahead with the install and hope I'm lucky. I then get a BSOD, saying the video driver was caught in an infinite loop, and to restart and try again, which I did just to get the same BSOD. So I set the video resolution to 800x600 VGA, remove the display driver, and try again. This time I got lucky and after some time and reboots, I've got windows 8 on my system! Pheww!!
I play around a while with the new UI, and it's like they say, just simply unacceptable, so one thing in the to-do list is to get it to revert to a classic standard interface.
But that's not my first concern right now. My hard drive is already almost 5 years old I believe, and the old days where drives typically went over ten years without failing are no more (the flip side of the incredibly high storage densities these days, plus the price competitiveness of the business).
So, my question: what exactly do I need to protect myself against this inevitable scenario?
What are my options for being able to restore my system? And what are all the things I need to do?
